The Back Stage Pages

Technical - Sound and Lighting

Most productions are straight forward technically, but the Panto usually starts with assembling the music some time before Christmas. Most music came from various Karaoke tapes/CDs, although now Alan Ramsbottom has joined us as musical director we are lucky enough to have live/sequenced music for the pantos - but this all takes time.

Over Christmas the sound effects are asembled onto a minidisc, Rich Hind now has a good library of sound effects on CD. Anything new can usually be put together in half an hour or so in the studio. It usually takes a good half a day to assemble all of the music and sound effects.

The next job is to set the lights. This is done about a week and a half before the performances. We have 16x 500 Watt lights (10 spots and 6 floods) running on 12 dimmer channels (Rated 1-2KW each) which makes planning very important to avoid overloading of dimmers and to make sure the stage is always well lit. Hanging the lights is a far safer job now we have a good solid step ladder in the Village Hall, it is quite scary the lengths that David Rutherford used to have to go to!

In the picture you can see Rich in action, the lighting desk is on the left and on the right is the sound mixing desk, with a MiniDisc player in the centre. The booth was built in the summer of 2006 to keep the equipment dry and the technician warm during the winter productions!

It takes about an hour to hang the lights and patch them in. This involves lots of running up and down ladders, getting very dusty and the occasional burn (they get very hoy very quickly). Lighting a whole stage evenly with a few lights is not easy, but after a few adjustments it usually looks pretty good.

Finally, the microphone cables and intercom cable need to be run in. They hand from ceiling hooks running down the left hand side of the village hall. By clever use of a modified broom handle this can be done without a ladder! At the same time a CCTV camera is put up so that the cast cast see what is happening on stage from the comfort of the dressing room.

It's then a matter of running through the production a couple of times and fitting in the sound cues as well as plotting the lighting changes. A normal play is usually sorted in one run through, but a panto, with many effects and scene changes can take two or three runs to get right (sometimes that includes the first night!).